General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAl Jazeera opinion piece: Comprehensive sex ed is a human right
Agree?
http://nar.al/46s
To withhold critical, lifesaving medical information from young people is a violation of their human rights. Sexuality education should be mandatory, shame-free and medically accurate. No matter how much politicians, parents and educators wring their hands, adolescents will continue to have sex and teaching them abstinence isnt going to deter them from it. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 44 percent of female teenagers and 47 percent of male teenagers between the ages of 1519 have had sex. If legislators keep chipping away at sex education programs, adolescents will not be equipped to make the best choices for themselves.
Its essential to give children age-appropriate information about their sexual development. There are so many things I wish I had learned about sex when I was a girl: what bodily changes to expect, the mechanics of sex, STD prevention, masturbation. Instead, my sex education was full of shame and double standards. At school, some teachers judged the girls who became pregnant. I once asked an administrator why there werent any programs to educate students about safe sex, and he replied that it wasnt the schools place, that it should be taught at home. Meanwhile, at home, I was taught that sex outside of marriage was immoral.
Because I was desperate for information, I would press my ear against my radio at night to listen to the call-in show Loveline. Teenagers would dial in to ask bizarre sex questions. Its how I learned about STDs. But life would have been much easier to navigate had I had been guided by thorough and sex-positive information. Simply having access to books would have helped. But where was a Mexican girl in a working-class neighborhood going to find a copy of that classic, evidence-based text on sex and sexuality, Our Bodies, Ourselves?
Though Im no longer the 15-year-old girl afraid of her own desire, its a shame that it took so many years of work to cultivate a healthy understanding of sexuality. I often think of the confused, young people out there who crave information and understanding right now. Who is going to help them navigate so many irrational and damaging messages?
WDIM
(1,662 posts)Lets stop talking about abortion and start talking about prevention and education. Without one you have more of the other.
arikara
(5,562 posts)where teen sexual activity is viewed as inevitable and not moral, have the lowest rates of teen pregnancies and lowest incidence of STDs as well.
The US has by far the highest number of any of the developed countries with 46 per 1000, and is the country that sunk billions of dollars into promoting abstinence only programs. Obviously they dont work.